Digital cameras are widely used in various applications. Recently, digital cameras become smaller in size to fit in emerging applications such as mobile phones, security and automobile cameras, medical devices, etc. A digital camera includes a lens to form an image, and an image sensor to capture the formed image and converse it into an electrical signal.
Camera modules for many applications are required to have a low manufacturing cost and small horizontal and vertical footprints. These may be manufactured and assembled using wafer level technology to produce wafer-level camera modules. Many if not all of the optical components are manufactured on silicon, glass or plastic wafers. The opto-wafers may be mounted together with an image sensor wafer (e.g., CMOS image sensor wafer), and the resultant wafer stack diced into individual camera modules. The complete camera, including the optics, may be manufactured and packaged at the wafer level using available semiconductor technology.
A wafer-level camera module typically includes a sensor package having an image sensor (e.g., CMOS image sensor) in the package. A lens cube that holds a lens or a combination of lenses in the cube is disposed on the top of the sensor package. On the other hand, an integrated housing may hold a lens or lenses and an image sensor as well.